A coalition of digital rights organizations and academics recently published an ‘open letter’ to the Anti-Malware/Anti-Virus industry asking for clarification on vendor policies regarding cooperation with government agencies and/or law enforcement using state-sponsored Trojans. This is ESET’s official response.

This weekend there will be street protests in Europe against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. I want to put on record ESET North America’s opposition to ratification of this agreement while applauding the actions of countries such as Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Germany in withholding or delaying ratification. I would encourage anyone

SOPA as currently constructed can never work as intended. I'm not going to get into the reasons we don't like it because of its oppressive implications or because it is against our first amendment rights nor for any other reason (there's been so much other commentary on those issues that it would be superfluous). I

SOPA and PIPA are pieces of legislation currently under consideration in the United States Congress that have serious implications for DNS, the Domain Name System which makes possible the Internet as we know it. To give them their full names these bills are HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and S.968, the Preventing

Sadly, Dennis Ritchie passed away today; there is a nice tribute to him here For anyone who ever learnt C programming back in school, you will, like me, probably have started out with the seminal text "The C Programming Language" written by Ritchie and Brian Kernigan. Ritchie was the co-creator of the C language –

ESET would like to extend our sincere sympathies to the friends, family and colleagues of Steve Jobs. Steve was a true visionary, without whom the world of computing would be very different. If you have never seen Steve's Stanford University Commencement Address, you should, it's truly inspirational. The third point he makes is that we

ESET wishes to apologize to Google and it’s CEO for a recent posting that failed to meet the high standards of professionalism our readers have come to expect from our blogs. In particular, ESET regrets any implication that there may have been deliberate unethical behavior on the parts of Google or it’s executives in relation

It's something of a truism, that 'old viruses never die', and that certainly seems to be the case for some of the older, more widespread, email worms. In this interview (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041129/news_lz1b29five.html) back in 2004, I talked about an email worm called "Win32/Zafi.b" which, at the time, had recently been spreading on a global scale. However,

Update: It seems like the initial article is inaccurate and that Paul Rellis never made any such comments about a 14 year old breaking into the X-Box live servers and have not offered to mentor him http://kotaku.com/5805742/microsoft-is-helping-an-xbox-live-hacker-develop-his-talent TekGoblin reports (http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/05/27/14-year-old-call-of-duty-hacker-hired-by-microsoft/) that a teenager who broke into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 gameservers last

Security companies in general and, unfortunately, anti-malware companies in particular, are often accused of ‘hyping’ threats because of a perceived self-interest. However, in the main, legitimate vendors and researchers like those at ESET typically try to resist overhyping or playing up threats where possible, in favor of more balanced discussion that can help customers take

Another day, another Facejack attack. We see a lot of these sorts of scams, alluringly titled posts – typically with a promise to show you who has been visiting your profile (or infamously, video of Osama Bin Laden's death) – that try to get you to click to see some special content. The latest one

Not using Twitter or Facebook is, in these times, akin to not owning or using a mobile ‘phone. Last night’s events – the reported death of Osama Bin Laden – proved that we are well and truly in the Twitter era (Twitter reported that over 4000 tweets per second were made immediately preceding the President’s

A government committee in the United Kingdom have been debating whether to force providers (such as Microsoft) to include content filters in their software (that they already do to some degree is not something you’d expect a government body to understand). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/27/culture_committee/ It seems that Microsoft have made the argument that adding filters would ‘send

Here’s a great interview with our good friend Professor Richard Ford of FIT on NPR. Discussing the last 25 years of viruses and malware, since the days that Elk Cloner came out on the Apple II, Richard takes you through some great tips for staying secure in today’s malware infested world. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11954260 Andrew Lee

The Win32/Stration family of worms has kept ESET’s analysts busy over the last few days; but last night, with close to 50 variants being released in one go, they were able to go home and get some sleep. Why? Well, last night they created a ThreatSense Heuristic Update which allowed them to catch